Left-Right coalition lists counterproductive programs to cut

A coalition of environmental and taxpayer groups have come up with $380 billion in savings over five years — that is roughly three quarters of a trillion over 10 — from programs they conclude both waste money and harm the environment.

Friends of the Earth, Taxpayers for Common Sense, Public Citizen and The Heartland Institute all manage to agree that subsidies to corn, crop insurance, nuclear power, oil, timber, mining, flood insurance and the like should go. They are urging the new deficit supercommittee, which has to come up with $1.5 trillion in deficit savings by Thanksgiving, to take a look.

Here’s the Green Scissors report. Press release here. Seems like a no-brainer given all the howls of anguish emanating from Washington. The only problem is both parties have constituents that love these programs.

Also on the list is a proposed tunnel to route the I-710 freeway under Pasadena.

The report arrives as the Congressional Budget Office delivers another grim prognosis that this year’s deficit will be $1.3 trillion, the third highest ever, surpassed only by deficits of the last two years. The 10-year deficit projection has fallen, however, to $3.5 trillion from the $6.7 trillion projected in March. CBO cites the debt-ceiling vote on the Budget Control Act for two thirds of the savings. The projections are overly optimistic, however, because by law CBO bases them on “current law” which assumes that Congress will cut payments to Medicare doctors, let the AMT hit millions of middle-class taxpayers and let all the Bush tax cuts expire, none of which it has ever done.

CBO states the obvious: “The United States is facing profound budgetary and economic challenges.”